Wit is a lean creature with sharp inquiring nose, whereas humor has a kindly eye and a comfortable girth. Wit, if it be necessary,... uses malice to score a point--like a cat it is quick to jump--but humor keeps the peace in an easy chair. Wit has a better voice in a solo, but humor comes into the chorus best. Wit is as sharp as a stroke of lightning, whereas humor is diffuse like sunlight. Wit keeps the season's fashions and is precise in the phrases and judgments of the day, but humor is concerned with homely eternal things. Wit wears silk, but humor in homely-spun endures the wind. Wit sets a snare, whereas humor goes off whistling without a victim in its mind. Wit is sharper company at the table, but humor serves better in mischance and in the rain. When it tumbles wit is sour, but humor goes uncomplaining without its dinner. Humor laughs at another's jest and holds its sides, while wit sits wrapped in study for a lively answer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I heartily wish you, in the plain home-spun style, a great number of happy new years, well employed in forming both your mind and ...your manners, to be useful and agreeable to yourself, your country, and your friends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Your rights reach down where all owners meet, in Hell'sPointed exclusive conclave, at earth's centre...(Your spun farm's root still on that axis dwells);And up, through galaxies, a growing sector.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise(That last infirmity of noble mind)...To scorn delights and live laborious days;But the fair guerdon where we hope to find,And think to burst out into sudden blaze,Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shearsAnd slits the thin-spun life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Quite different from them [abstractions of animal nature] in origin and intent, but confused with them in form, are those other co...mpanions of Dionysus, Pan and his children. Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no story; he is but a presence; the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life there; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; its one adornment and solace being the dance to the homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges of the brook Molpeia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »